Gary Varvel: GOP's Halloween costume

My response to Rahm Emanuel's brother about ethics and morality

Gary Varvel

Oct 21, 2023

After Jim Jordan failed to gain the votes, the GOP continues without a Speaker of the House.

ARCHIVES: As my 2015 cartoon shows, the Republicans have had problems agreeing on a speaker for a long time.

AMERICA’S MORAL FAILURE

One of my subscribers recently sent me a New York Times column written by Ezekiel J. Emanuel, professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the brother of Rahm Emanuel (former Chief of Staff to President Obama and mayor of Chicago).

Emanuel writes that our schools have ‘failed’ to teach morality. He laments that the student demonstrations blaming Israel is proof of our failure. He writes, “Those of us who are university leaders and faculty are at fault. We may graduate our students, confer degrees that certify their qualifications as the best and brightest. But we have clearly failed to educate them. We have failed to give them the ethical foundation and moral compass to recognize the basics of humanity.”

What Emanuel is actually complaining about is the result of secularism (godlessness). Since our Supreme Court rejected a Biblical standard of morality in 1963, exactly what standard of morality are we supposed to use today?

In 1852, Daniel Webster, an early American Jurist and Senator wrote, “If we and our posterity reject religious instruction and authority, violate the rules of eternal justice, trifle with the injunctions of morality, and recklessly destroy the political constitution which holds us together, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us that shall bury all our glory in profound obscurity.” (Emphasis mine)

We are witnessing the catastrophe that Webster warned about. Our nation has descended into spiritual darkness.

Like a person who tries to read a sundial at night by using a flashlight, we have rejected God’s light and created our own. The result has been a constantly changing morality.

In Isaiah 50:11, God tells people who try to create their own moral standard, “This is the reward you will receive from Me: You will soon fall down in great torment.”

Think about this, our future leaders at the elite universities are protesting Israel and supporting terrorists. Why is this happening? Emanuel thinks it’s because our colleges have failed to teach morality.

The truth is found in the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

In 1832, Noah Webster warned, “All the evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.”

Ok, so America has all of those problems but isn’t America too big to fail? I remind you that the Bible is full of examples of world empires that fell.

In Jeremiah 18:7-8, God says, “The instant I speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, to pull down, and to destroy it, if that nation against whom I have spoken turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I thought to bring upon it.”

If we repent of our evil (which means turning from our sins) and turn back in faith to our Creator, God will be gracious to us. But how is that going to happen unless we return to teaching the only standard for morality which is found in the Bible?

Emanuel never defines his standard for, “strong moral and ethical foundations.” But without the Biblical standard, all other guidelines for morality are nothing more than personal opinions.

Biblical instruction was replaced by teaching secular humanism which has produced immoral students who support terrorists. Daniel and Noah Webster predicted that something like this would happen to America if we rejected the Bible.

America needs a Spiritual Revival and the only way that can happen is by prayer and a return to the Judeo/Christian teaching of morality found in God’s word.

FREE ART LESSON

TODAY, I will be at the Great American Family Festival teaching drawing lessons in 2 sessions from 1pm to 2pm and 3pm to 4pm. This is free for all ages. See the poster below for details. If you’re in central Indiana, come and see me. I will also be selling some merchandise so visit my table.

RIGHT LINKS

Indiana Policy Review - Richard Moss, M.D.: How many Gazas have we imported into our own country because of misguided policies?…How many 9/11s await us?

New York Post: Columbia professor rips university’s president over Israel-Hamas war response: ‘I would never send my daughter here.’

Townhall - Guy Benson: Compare and contrast: What does, and does not, outrage this squad member.